To respect or protect? Whose values shape the ethics of refugee research?

In early 2000, a colleague and I submitted an application to our university HREC for a pilot project to modify a series of standardised wellbeing instruments for a longitudinal study of refugee youth settlement. The pilot study was collaborative in that we worked with a small group of young adults with refugee backgrounds to design sampling and data collection strategies and a set of research tools or instruments that could be used to gather qualitative and quantitative information about settlement experiences (Gifford, Bakopanos, Kaplan, and Correa-Velez, 2007; Gifford, Correa-Velez, and Sampson, 2009). Although the ethics application was straightforward, it was returned by the HREC as not approved. We were not surprised when our application was returned because in our experience, human ethics applications with/on refugees almost never get approved outright. However, we were surprised about the reason it had been returned. The HREC took objection to one of the questions we were using to explore how scaled items could be best presented - a question chosen by the group of young adults collaborating with us on the pilot: 'How much do you like ice cream?' and 'Given a choice between ice cream and pizza, which would you choose first?'. The HREC judged these questions as having the potential to cause harm to resettled refugee youth because they were refugees. The logic was that being refugees, these youth would have experienced starvation and like other forms of trauma, questions about food were seen as a risk to re-traumatise. We were asked to attend the next meeting of the HREC to explain our choice of foods such as 'ice cream and pizza' for this population and why we believed that these questions were unlikely to cause harm - to re-traumatise this group.